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Laser Ablation Processing (LAP)

PowerPhotonic uses a revolutionary technology for the fabrication of optical components in silica glass. This technology, based on laser direct-write micromachining, offers ground-breaking opportunities for the design, manufacture and supply of products that can transform the performance of a wide range of optical systems from acceptable to outstanding. This direct-write machining process allows optical surfaces to be made that are fully customised to a particular application, often enabling complex systems to realise diffraction-limited performance without extending the budget. The laser micromachining technology developed by PowerPhotonic has no symmetry restrictions, meaning whole new classes of optical surfaces can be created to fulfil requirements that were previously declared unfeasible.

PowerPhotonic’s unique direct-write manufacturing process uses computer-controlled beams of laser light to machine 3-D refractive optical structures and to provide sub-nm surface smoothing. The result is the capacity to manufacture freeform structures with high optical performance, great design flexibility, rapid turn-around time and at low cost.

PowerPhotonic Laser Ablation Process (LAP)

This process can generate smooth refractive surfaces in fused silica with sag up to 200µm. Since it is a fully direct-write process, wafer-scale processing can be used to generate high volumes of identical parts, and also high volumes of different parts, each individually serialized, tested, and traceable. This brings the benefits of high-volume fabrication of freeform optics, without the prototype and low-volume price and lead time penalties of other manufacturing approaches.